Eating meat with lower carbon footprint often means killing more animals
Humor and thought experiments
- Thread opens with jokes (pandas, koalas, blue whales, mammoths) to highlight how “calories per animal killed” can lead to odd conclusions.
- Some imagine future scenarios: braindead livestock or pure muscle cultures optimized for meat with minimal suffering.
Lab-grown vs conventional meat
- One camp says if lab-grown steak becomes indistinguishable, knowingly choosing the “animal death” version is morally disturbing.
- Others insist they’d still prefer meat from a real cow, valuing tradition, symbolism, or distrust of food corporations to keep lab meat “pure.”
- Disagreement on whether preferring animal-killed meat over identical lab meat is ethically neutral or “psychopathic.”
Human diet: nature, culture, and alternatives
- Several argue humans are naturally omnivores and that’s reflected in meat-eating across cultures.
- Others point to vegetarian traditions (e.g., some Native American and Indian communities) as counterexamples.
- Insects and lab-grown meat are proposed as low-footprint, potentially more ethical protein; some question insect sentience, others link evidence that invertebrate consciousness is plausible.
Valuing animal lives and suffering
- Debate on whether a cow’s life is “worth” more than a chicken’s or a fish’s, and what metric to use.
- Some suggest capacity for suffering as the core metric; others note we can’t access animals’ inner lives and differences are hard to quantify.
- Utilitarian-style “exchange rates” (e.g., one cow vs several chickens) are discussed but seen as arbitrary.
- Some point out that in practice humans reveal unequal valuations (children vs adults, mothers vs fetuses, etc.), even if they claim equality.
Tradeoffs, carbon, and priorities
- Many stress that environmental choices are full of tradeoffs (EVs vs mining, plastic vs heavy glass, cotton vs water use, fur vs microplastics).
- Some argue to focus on “super polluters” and largest emissions sources rather than marginal lifestyle tweaks.
- Others highlight that livestock is a substantial share of emissions and thus not a “tiny” problem.
- There’s pushback against carbon-footprint accounting from skeptics who compare it to “astrology” and emphasize natural sources like wildfires; others counter with data from cited reports.
- A minority view: simplest solution is to stop eating animals; others focus on “less but better” or local/hunted meat (e.g., venison), noting new risks like disease.